The fruity cargo cult Apple has decided to punish its poor Indian customers for its government daring to make it pay tax by raising its prices even more so that less people can afford them.

Apple has decided to make its products more expensive in India and price them off the market in a stunning example of “cut your nose off to spite your face” manoeuvre.

Barring its locally-assembled iPhone SE model, Apple raised prices of iPhone handsets by an average 3.5 percent, according to a price sheet reviewed by Reuters.

Its priciest iPhone X model now costs 105,720 rupees ($1,646.61) for a 256 gigabyte (GB) variant, according to Apple’s India website, an increase of 3.6 percent. The price of a 256 GB iPhone 8 has risen by 3.1 percent to 79,420 rupees. The average yearly salary in India is about $3,030 or 192,050 rupees.

For those who came in late, Apple is desperate to flog its expensive iPhones to third world countries which can’t afford them. This has become critical now that China has realised that the iPhone is an expensive turkey and you can get much more gadget value for half the price from home-based industries.

Apple turned to India and promised politicians that it would provide jobs if the Indians looked the other way when it came to tax. To be fair to Apple, this approach worked rather well in Ireland.

However, the Indians looked at the numbers and worked out that if Apple paid its tax, then it could afford to start new industries and employ more people itself.

The fruity cargo cult was furious and has decided that it would increase the price of its already overpriced products to cover the cost of the tax. We guess it thought that the population would rise up and overthrow the government so they could buy iPhones at a lower price.

Of course, it also meant that Apple, which was already pretty much priced off the market for most Indians, would be even less likely to sell. But hey, Apple is sending a message and it is up to the Indian government to do what it is told.

We suspect that the Indian government has rationally worked out that the country needs Apple in the same way that it wants an invasion by Pakistan.

The Indian Government has told the fruity cargo cult Apple that it will not be a special tax case.

Apple asked India to defer a planned increase in import taxes on mobile phone parts so it can expand its iPhone manufacturing in the country. Basically Apple is saying that unless you do what you are told we will not set up all those plants which are designed to make us rich in your country.

However, it seems that the government is not buying that argument and despite Apple lobbying politicians and officials for months demanding government tax breaks and incentives the Indians do not see the point. Apple needs the Indian market more than the Indian government needs Apple, particularly as the Chinese market has become bored with Jobs' Mob’s expensive toys.

While India’s government has been keen to get Apple to manufacture in India as a showpiece investment, it wants Apple to use local parts. Apple will not even talk about that unless India agrees to the same sort of tax dodges it enjoys in less civilised countries.

The Tame Apple Press is furious saying that it is terrible that Apple made all that effort to make a “cheap” iPhone SE for the Indians and now they are insisting Apple pays tax.

Despite a boom in smartphone sales in India, Apple’s market share is only around two percent there. Counterpoint Research data shows that while more than three quarters of smartphones sold in India are made locally, about 90 percent of the $14 billion worth of mobile components are imported.

To change that scenario, India imposes a 10 percent tax on imported components such as batteries, chargers and headsets.

Under a “phased manufacturing program” (PMP), the government plans to extend the taxes to more components as a way of nudging parts makers to switch to more local production.

Apple has said it would be able to create 5,000-10,000 jobs in India as and when it expands there. We guess the Indians have crunched the numbers and worked out that Apple needs to set up shop to make money and if the government demands it pays tax it can afford to create new jobs with the cash.

The Tame Apple Press ran a story about how wonderful its favourite fruity tax-dodger had agreed to help to the Indian government to develop an anti-spam mobile application for its iOS platform.

However the story failed to mention that it was another incidence of Apple’s arrogance in dealing with government and regulatory authorities which dared to stand up to it.

Apple has been locked in a tussle with India’s telecoms regulator for more than a year. The watchdog had wanted Apple to develop an app which allowed iPhone users to report unsolicited marketing texts or calls as spam.

Pesky marketing calls and unsolicited commercial text messages have become a big problem in India.

Google was able to comply with the rule and the government app was launched on Google’s Android platform last year. However, Apple refused, claiming that a government app with access to call and text logs could compromise its customers’ privacy.

After a while the regulator became a little miffed at Apple and there were threats of sanctions. Apple executives flew to New Delhi last month and told officials the company would help develop the app, but only with limited capabilities.

Apple’s executives insisted that its iOS platform might not allow for some of the government’s requests, such as making call logs available within the app that would allow users to report them as spam, the official said.

However Apple will help develop an app which, to an extent, can solve the requirements, said the official.

Neil Shah of Hong Kong-based technology research firm Counterpoint Research said the matter was more of an ego tussle between Apple and the Regulator which covers Apple’s chief worry.

If one government succeeds in telling Apple what to do, then others will follow. The worry is less that governments will insist on backdoors, more that they will want software which Apple does not want.

The chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) R.S. Sharma said he was unhappy with Apple for not responding swiftly to the government’s requests.

“We’ve told them they are harming their consumers. I hope good sense prevails upon them.”

TRAI said the app does not raise any privacy concerns.

Later that month, Apple again approached the TRAI saying it had identified potential solutions but they would require additional discussions with the regulator’s technical staff.

Horvath and other Apple executives met TRAI officials in October and conveyed they would help them develop the first version of the app with limited features.

Sure we will prop up your failing business model - what else can we spend our cash on?

It appears that the Indian government is taking seriously a request from Apple to help prop up its failing business model and inflate its stonking margins.

India is apparently a country so rich that it can afford to give cash-rich American companies pot loads of money and sweeteners and Apple has said that it will set up a unit to assemble its iPhones in the country if the government helps out.

Ramesh Abhishek, the top bureaucrat in the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, confirmed that the Indian government was considering Apple’s request. Apple has not really come up with any new products for three years and is running out of ideas about how it can keep its iPhone cash cow going. It really needs the large Indian market after Chinese shoppers rejected it. If it can squeeze a bit of government money to help it do that we guess it will help, but we can't see how that is good for India.

Apple has asked federal government officials for a range of tax and policy changes to help build out its iPhone assembly work in India.

It is seeking permission to open its own retail stores in India where it currently sells iPhones through resellers.

India has given Chinese smartphone maker Oppo the go-ahead to open its own single-brand retail stores, boding well for rivals like Apple, which are seeking similar approvals.

The difference, of course, is that the likes of Oppo can provide products Indians can afford, while Apple is going to provide products that only the very rich can buy.

Stealing a movie in India proved a song and dance for the hackers who ended up arrested.

A bunch of hackers thought it would be a wizard wheeze to hack into a Bollywood studio and steal Baahubali 2: The Conclusion.

Despite the title, Baahubali 2 is a “record-breaking movie taking India by storm" and the hackers managed to get their paws on a print. The studio Arka Mediaworks was contacted by someone who told them that if a ransom wasn't paid, the flick would be leaked onto the internet.

Arka contacted the police, who advised the company to engage the 'kidnappers' in dialogue to obtain proof that they had the movie in question. That was delivered in the form of a high-definition sample of the movie.

It is unclear whether those who sent the sample were aware, but the movie was forensically marked, something which allowed police and investigators to track the copy back to a specific theatre.

Shortly after, the owner of the theatre was arrested by police. This was followed by the arrest of the person who allegedly called Arka Mediaworks with the ransom demand.

In total, six arrests were made, with two of the men already known to police.

Ransoming of movies is becoming a new thing in 2017, with Russian organised crime normally behind it. This appears to have been a large, but less professional attempt.

The Fruity cargo-cult Apple has completed its first trial run assembly of the iPhone SE in India as part of a cunning plan to get a foothold in a market which favours cheap and cheerful products.

Apple said that it is beginning initial production of a small number of iPhone SE in Bengaluru and it will be shipped to domestic customers this month.

The tax-dodging phone maker has some tough competition, mostly because its rivals have worked out that you can’t flog $1,000 phones in a region where poverty means that you have to get value for money.

Its chief rival Samsung has dominated the ranks in recent years, with around a quarter of the market by various analyst estimates.

Chinese brands like Xiaomi, Oppo, Lenovo and Vivo have carved up the rest of the market where the average handset runs $150.

The four-inch SE is Apple’s least expensive model, running at $399 in the States. Some retailers in the country have managed to undercut the cost, lower the entry level price of the handset by around $80 – but even then, it is more expensive and less useful. Indians have spurned the SE as if were a rabid dog.

The Tame Apple Press claims that local assembly might reduce the cost of the SE by as much as $100. But while $220 is certainly a lot more palatable, that still marks a large premium over the average handset price.

Besides, historically, Apple wants to keep pricing consistent across markets so it is probable that it will just pocket the difference and hope that Indians are as stupid as Americans and will buy it anyway.

Only 36 percent of Indian software engineers can write compilable code, the Indian skills assessment company Aspiring Minds says in a report.

The figure is based on measurements by an automated tool and based on a sample of 36,800 from more than 500 Indian colleges.

Aspiring Minds used the automated tool Automata which is a 60 minute test taken in a compiler integrated environment and rates candidates on programming ability, programming practices, run-time complexity and test case coverage.

"We find that out of the two problems given per candidate, only 14 per cent engineers are able to write compilable codes for both and only 22 per cent write compilable code for exactly one problem," the study said.

It further found that of the test subjects only 14.67 percent were employable by an IT services company.

When it came to writing fully functional code using the best practices for efficiency and writing, only 2.21 percent of the engineers studied cut the mustard.

"Functionally correct code is the basic requisite of a good programmer. However, to enhance the quality of the code, a few more important indicators have emerged - efficiency, time complexity and space complexity," the study said.

"Nothing is more time-consuming than dealing with badly written code which leads to enormous bugs and exceptions. The analysis unveils that only 2.21 percent engineers possess the skillset to write logically correct code with best efficiency and least time-space complexity."

The subjects of the study were 61.1 percent male and 38.9 percent female. They came from the cities of Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Kolkata.

It would be interesting to see the same test applied to other countries, as this being seen in isolation implies that Indian programmers are rubbish. When all programmers could be pants.

When the Freedom 251 smartphone was touted with a $4 price tag there were a large number of people who said it will never happen.

Made by Ringing Bells, the Freedom phone was going out without any carrier subsidy, it had a dismal “what the hell an you expect for $4 spec” It features an 4-core 1.3 Ghz Processor, with 1GB RAM and 8GB internal memory, and runs an Android Lollipop 5.1 distribution complete with civilian and government applications for Indian citizens.

The deal did happen with the phone starting to go out, but now it seems Ringing Bell’s founder Mohit Goel has been arrested on allegations of fraud, after a handset dealer accused the company of not refunding him for an unfulfilled order.

The founder was arrested after a dealer said he had paid three million Indian rupees for an order of handsets but had received only a fraction of the order. He added that some of the phones received were defective, according to the coppers.

The dealer said he received only 1.4 million rupees in new phones and cash. When he asked Ringing Bells for a refund, the dealer said Mohit Goel and another executive at the mobile phone maker threatened to kill him and his family, as you do.

We suspect that Ringing Bells will be ringing a few alarm bells in India over the coming months as those who subsidised it have to ask a few questions.

While you would be forgiven for thinking that Samsung is stuffed thanks to the Note 7 fiasco, the story is far from over. The Korean phone company has been making all the right moves which in the long term will pay off big time.

The Fruity Cargo cult Apple has been trying to convince the world that it has a long term future. It touted China and India as the key markets where it was going to expand. After all they were areas which still needed a smartphone revolution and the US and European markets were saturated. However Apple largely failed to do that, mostly because its products were too pricey for India while the Chinese were too canny to fall for Apple marketing.

Samsung however appears to be firmly grounded in both markets and is continuing to make gains. Samsung is lndia's eading the country's phone manufacturer, cornering 22.6 percent of the smartphone market between July and September, according to Counterpoint Research. That's more than double that of its nearest competitor, Indian brand Micromax, which had a 9.9 percent market share.

Compared to the same quarter last year, Samsung's smartphone market share is down by a small fraction -- it held 23.2 percent of the market last year. However, it has a greater hold on the handset market as a whole. In India, where feature phones are still popular, the company had an overall handset market share of 22.6 percent, compared to 19 percent in the same quarter last year. In China, Samsung is not doing as well as Oppo, Vivo, Huawei and Xiaomi But the numbers it is selling are huge and still above Apple.

But India is a money spinner and a number two behind China. Last year the country's smartphone sales eclipsing those in the United States last year for the first time. It is also growing.

Beancouters at Counterpoint Research say that Q3 was a "record quarter" for smart and feature phone sales in India. Samsung is also not going to face much fall out from the Note 7 in that country. With most smartphones sold in India costing under $150, it's unlikely the premium device would have made up a huge amount of the company's shipments.

What is important then is that while Apple is talking about these markets, Samsung is in there and doing the right things. This means that when the Note 7 fiasco has gone away, Samsung will be still strongly positioned in the only smartphone areas which are growing. This should be a problem for Apple as its iPhone 7 cash cow slowly dies.

Now that the Chinese smartphone market has become saturated, telco makers are trying to jump through all the hoops the Indian government is setting up so they can set up shop there.

One of the most common methods being adopted by foreign companies is to butter up the Indian government by setting up R&D and training programmes or setting up large local manufacturing operations.

Now MediaTek has announced a training program to foster and develop talent for India's fast-growing handset industry, while disclosing plans to triple its workforce locally to 1,500 employees.

The training programme, created in collaboration with India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Indian Cellular Association (ICA) and Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), will propel the "Make in India" initiative.

It will start later in 2016, provides hands-on training to managers and senior engineers from India on efficient planning and execution of handset design projects.

It will train more than 50 professionals, with at least five years of experience in R&D in electronics, will be selected from key handset makers across India to take part in the training programme.

MediaTek will train engineers in R&D competence and design project management. The company will also coordinate with key component companies to be part of the training module with hands-on instruction.

MediaTek has announced that it will triple its workforce in India to 1,500 people over the next three years. The Taiwan-based company currently employs 500 in India.

MediaTek opened its India office in Noida in 2004. In 2014, the company invested US$350 million to expand its business and establish an R&D facility in Bengaluru. MediaTek also actively invests in India's innovation ecosystem.